Young boys for rent

“The people of Lut rejected (his) warning. We sent against them a violent tornado with showers of stones, (which destroyed them), except Lut’s household: And (Lut) did warn them of Our punishment, but they disputed about the warning” — Surat al-Qamar: 33-36.

The mount of Sodom, a barren wasteland, rises sharply above the Dead Sea. No one has ever found the destroyed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah but scholars believe that they stood in the Vale of Siddim across from these cliffs. Possibly the flood waters of the Dead Sea engulfed them following an earthquake. Pompeii, the symbol of the degeneration of the Roman Empire, was also involved in sexual perversity. Its end was similar to that of the people of Lut. The destruction of Pompeii came by means of the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius. Whatever else one makes of these stories, they are about homosexual rape and, like any rape, it is an act of violence. In short, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and all references to it elsewhere in scripture, provide guidance for modern day believers about the immorality of homosexuality.

Director Mohammed Naqvi and British producer Jamie Doran’s film Pakistan’s Hidden Shame was shown in UK on Channel 4, revealing the punishing reality of paedophilia occurring in the northern areas of Pakistan. The documentary, mainly set in the city of Peshawar, interviews homeless boys of different ages recalling their experiences of sexual abuse and male prostitution. The documentary claims that nine out of 10 children in Peshawar have been victims of paedophilia. It also includes interviews with the truck drivers who have committed such crimes. Unashamed, callous and remorseless, one of the drivers admits to having raped more than 10 boys. When confronted, PTI Chairman Imran Khan admitted, “It is one of the most sad and shameful aspects of our society. I am totally embarrassed by this and that we have not really been able to protect them.”

I do seek to condemn these people for their violent, criminal and inhumane desires. Everyone should be free to develop their own conscientiousness but I feel that people like these are dangerous monsters in the ways they seek to impose themselves on innocent and young children for their sexual desires. Poverty and social inequality in the third world may have resulted in predisposing these young children for sexual exploitation but these sexual predators have allowed themselves to become paedophiles and are within themselves the major implementers of this brutal sexual exploitation and abuse of young children that has taken our society to the brink of destruction.

Most men who use child prostitutes are the monstrous paedophiles of popular stereotype. The reasons and justifications they give for their behaviour are derived from ideas about sex, gender, money and sexual frustrations that are widespread and indeed shameful in the societies they come from. Over the past many decades, male child prostitution and child sexual abuse have not been very newsworthy topics and responsible media coverage has been almost silent when compared to its projection of silly breaking news that gets annoyingly repeated and reported on cable television channels in Pakistan. Child prostitution and child sex abuse are widely assumed to involve paedophiles, abnormal individuals who specifically seek out contexts in which pre-pubertal children will be made sexually available to them. Though shocking, these morally repugnant paedophiles make the problem of child prostitution in Pakistan a serious matter of grave consequence.

If we want to understand the reasons behind child prostitution, we have to concern ourselves with questions about poverty, immorality and the demand for prostitution more generally. This means addressing much broader and more difficult questions about prostitution, gender and sexuality. It means questioning the way in which we socialise with our children and the attitudes that we tolerate. When I watched the stories in the documentary that men tell about their own child prostitute exploitation and the reasons they use to justify the sexual abuse of minors in the sex trade, painful as it is, the combination of poverty and sexual frustration appears to be the leading factor behind the plague of child prostitution on the streets of Peshawar. I do not differ with this ugly truth but grounded beneath this criminal mind is the thrill of predatory paedophile power play these men have over vulnerable children.

The vast majority of child abusers I have interviewed in Pakistan were entirely morally indifferent to questions about why the children and teenagers they exploit were willing to enter into prostitution contracts with them. This notion of children in prostitution as sexually experienced, as spoiled goods, as agents in their own exploitation and as exploiters of adult men’s frailty even was the widespread response amongst many child abusers. Some even felt that the prostitution contract could be morally executed with women they know to be debt-bonded to a brothel owner, or with 10 and 11-year-old children they know to be homeless, destitute and/or addicted to drugs. They reason that they are under no obligation to give help or care to the child or to anyone else without sexual favour in return.

Until we acknowledge that the commercial sexual exploitation of children is more than just a law enforcement issue, we will not be able to produce an effective response. Unless we are willing to face the unpalatable fact that the people who use child prostitutes are monstrous members of our society, produced by us, we are in danger of formulating policies and anchoring television shows that, at best, do nothing meaningful to address the problem and, at worst, intensify the vulnerability of those already most vulnerable within prostitution.

We need to insist that governments recognise and take on board the complexities of prostitution as a whole and address the inequalities of economic, social and political power that underpin it, rather than treating problems such as minors in the sex trade or trafficking as simply or primarily law enforcement or criminal justice issues. We must also begin to think critically about how to transform our own societies’ attitudes towards rectitude, crime and punishment.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com